Six New Ways to Die

And when the lies finally catch up with you

This Week’s post looks at that new project I’m messing with.

I'm testing out an alternative wound system for *clears throat* Intergalactic Bastionland.

This game is very much at the "throw everything into a document then take an axe to it later" stage, so take this with a heavy pinch of salt.

The intent is to tap into the visceral appeal of Scars from Electric/Mythic Bastionland, but have them occur every time a character is wounded.

This might well make combat too bloody, but only testing will tell.

Oh yeah, and six damage types is probably too many. I just had the first three for a while but thought it could be fun to have three weird damage types to draw on alongside the core three. I'll talk about my ideas for weapons and armour another time.

There are some other ideas thrown in here too:

• Stunt/Flourish/Escalate adds a bit of a gambling element to Saves.

• Recovery is something I've messed with before, allowing a small amount of GD recovery during combat but only if you fall back to safety.

• Stratagems are a reflavouring of Mythic's Feats, putting the focus more on pre-combat planning than individual heroics.

Will be interesting to look back on this further down the line and see what has survived.

This is probably the last blogpost of the year, so thanks for reading and see you in 2025!

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Elsewhere

• Bommyknocker Press has a really cool reputation system to track how much you’ve lied to a certain community.

• Trilemma Adventures transplants a tarot-style oracle system onto a humble d6.

• The Twelve Failed Careers of Oddmas is still the go-to supplement to add festive cheer to your Into the Odd and Bastionland games.

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Coming Soon

Over on Patreon I revisit the topic of hard counters.

I previously wrote about favouring Tactical Counterplay over Strategic Counterplay.

In short: I like games where you can counter and counter-counter your opponents through decisions in play rather than decisions that happen before the game begins.

Now that was in the context of miniature wargames, but I think RPGs present a slightly different situation.

Expect the full post here and on the blog in the new year.

That’s right, we’re done for 2024, see you all in 2025.

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